This blog was written by a missionary who requested that I withhold his last name due to the dangerous mission field where he’s serving Christ. But his words are a powerful reminder of our responsibility to share the Gospel with friends, family, and coworkers, to pray for the lost, and to support missionaries (through our finances and our prayers) who take the Gospel to places that we’ll never be able to go. Let’s keep that in mind as we serve Christ in 2014.
· · · · · · · By Stephen · · · · · · ·
At this very moment, writing the first Call to Prayer of the new year, I can hear the Friday sermon of an imam in a nearby mosque being broadcast across the neighborhood. As I sit here after having lived in the Middle East for little more than a year, my heart is still so deeply stirred to think of the many hundreds of thousands of people separated from God and without hope. There are many reasons the majority of the world still sits in darkness, but it simply boils down to a matter of disobedience. God’s people have not obeyed what the Lord Jesus gave us to do. The problem is not a matter of a lack of supply or a matter of a lack of demand. Rather, it is a matter of the lack of distribution.
All of the resources of an eternal Creator are at the disposal of His children to get His message to the lost, but we have disobeyed. Robert Savage, with the Latin American Mission, said, “The command has been to ‘go,’ but we have stayed — in body, gifts, prayer and influence. He has asked us to be witnesses unto the uttermost parts of the earth … but 99% of Christians have kept puttering around in the homeland.”
William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army reminded his workers, “Put your ear down to the Bible, and hear Him bid you go and pull sinners out of the fire of sin. Put your ear down to the burdened, agonized heart of humanity, and listen to its pitiful wail for help. Go stand by the gates of hell, and hear the damned entreat you to go to their father’s house and bid their brothers and sisters and servants and masters not to come there. Then look Christ in the face — whose mercy you have professed to obey — and tell Him whether you will join heart and soul and body and circumstances in the march to publish His mercy to the world.”
As I enter this new year, I am more aware than ever of the brevity of time. In this new year, let us determine, with the help of the Lord to be concerned with that which concerns the heart of God. Let us fall in love with Him and from a heart after God, take His message to a lost world. The divine task of reaching the lost is not reserved for the pastor or for the family moving to some remote (or not-so-remote) region of the world. This heavenly mandate is for all of those who know the Lord Jesus Christ. We are left in this world as ambassadors of the King of Kings to share His message with the condemned.
“The concern for world evangelization is not something tacked on to a man’s personal Christianity, which he may take or leave as he chooses. It is rooted in the character of the God who has come to us in Christ Jesus. Thus, it can never be the province of a few enthusiasts, a sideline or a specialty of those who happen to have a bent that way. It is the distinctive mark of being a Christian.” — James S. Stewart
Reaching the world begins by reaching the one next door. May God stir us this year to renewed passion for Him and His zeal to reach those around us with all expediency.